The future of work includes a return of managing, therapy and leading by walking around
 This is the second in a series of articles about the Future of Work (FoW). By way of review, the work we do here in the NIH Clinical Center has been divided into transactional work or "my" work for which we have built technological tools to make certain we get that work done and relational work or "our" work that still cannot be accomplished as readily even with the available tools.
Managing by Walking Around (MBWA) is a term popularized in the early 1980's in a book by business experts Tom Peters and Robert W. Waterman. The book title was "In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies". They observed that the best companies' managers spend a portion of their time with their reports looking for how the assigned work is being accomplished, making on-the-spot corrections, and acknowledging those doing excellent work. Perhaps even more importantly, managers use this time to listen to staff other than their direct reports about problems or issues or even suggestions about how the work might be done better. Peters and Waterman posit that MBWA pays big dividends at the institutional level. Although Peters and Waterman were not talking about healthcare specifically, MBWA remains very important in the hospital setting.
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The right person at the right time
 A staggering degree of thought went into designing blueprints for the Surgery Radiology, and Lab Medicine (SRLM) tower that will soon begin to rise from the northeast side of the Clinical Center.
If one were to just as carefully design the ideal person to help figure out how to outfit, operationalize, and, indeed, optimize that space, well, those "blueprints" might look a lot like…. Richard Bond's resume.
Fortunately, the aforementioned Bond already works "across the street" at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS), on the grounds of Naval Support Activity Bethesda. Now, thanks to a special arrangement with USUHS, Bond is detailed to the Clinical Center part time for that very purpose.
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New tool keeps patients and care teams connected
 Telehealth Appointments by Month in 2022.
What can you do when you have patients who need medical care, but you're in the middle of a pandemic. For many healthcare providers, the solution was increasing access to telehealth, and the NIH Clinical Center was no exception.
The importance of staying connected to patients during a health crisis meant that telehealth became an important tool overnight. Implementing this task was the Clinical Center's Health Information Management Division (HIMD) who provide support for both NIH care teams and patients.
Spurred by the pandemic, telehealth appointments at the Clinical Center skyrocketed from fewer than 100 a month in April 2020 to more than 630 a month in 2022.
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